


What it is to be Eternal

by Val_Teal



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Acceptance, Angst, Depression, Do they even count as characters?, Eternity, Hogwarts, Immortal Harry, Immortality, Is this even Harry Potter anymore?, Master of Death Harry Potter, Not A Fix-It, Ok really depressing, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Seriously read this if you want an existential crisis, Seriously what is my brain?, Sort Of, Time Travel, Unspecified - Freeform, and adhd, author has dyslexia, kind of, maybe? - Freeform, mind boggling, no beta we die like men, probably not, the vast emptiness of space
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2021-03-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27799174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Teal/pseuds/Val_Teal
Summary: “And either must die at the hand of the other,” a phrase far more damning than Harry had ever imagined, because it didn’t just mean that he had to become a murderer, no that was the most innocent interpretation. Because Harry knew now what it really meant. It meant that no one but he could kill Voldemort, that much he’d always known, but the prophecy went both ways and now Voldemort was dead and there was no one left who could kill Harry and he really should have seen it coming.OrHarry Potter is immortal and his mental health is nonexistent at this point.Formerly called Unfelt Torture
Comments: 16
Kudos: 51





	1. Beginning: The Castle

“And either must die at the hand of the other,” a phrase far more damning than Harry had ever imagined, because it didn’t just mean that he had to become a murderer, no that was the most innocent interpretation. Because Harry knew now what it really meant. It meant that no one but he could kill Voldemort, that much he’d always known, but the prophecy went both ways and now Voldemort was dead and there was no one left who could kill Harry and he really should have seen it coming. His hands were shaking as he took in the familiar walls of Hogwarts, students milling and laughing, innocent and free of the war that had always haunted his life. The oldest of the students were ten years his junior and yet he looked like one of them.

Harry Potter was lost, alone as his friends moved onto real life and he was trapped in a war a decade past. Headmistress McGonagall had offered him a position as a teacher, whatever position he wanted. She wanted to keep an eye on him, he guessed or maybe she thought she owed him something. It didn’t matter to him though because it kept him busy and he never had to leave the castle. He taught his students defense, not only against the dark arts but against everything. He taught with an intensity and fervor that engaged and terrified the students. He didn’t learn their names, he couldn’t. Though none of his students had died he knew eventually they would blur together and he would be teaching their grandchildren. So he was impersonal. And yet he never let a student fail, he was obsessive with making sure they were all prepared and ready to defend themselves and every last one of them could have dueled death eaters and won.

It wasn’t enough. Harry couldn’t spend every moment teaching but he spent the rest of his time learning. During weekends and holidays Harry haunted the library without purpose, lived in the stacks, wandering aimlessly and pausing only when a book caught his eye. The first few weeks of this he missed all of Monday before someone found and retrieved him. There was new job that the staff juggled each Sunday night now.

Harry became a bit of a legend to the students, he never ate in the hall and the only time he was seen was during classes and occasionally he was spotted in the library. It became a bit of a game among students to search the library for the living ghost. Harry didn’t notice as he absorbed the vast knowledge of the library. He learned all he could about alchemy and ancient runes, then about great wizards like Merlin and the founders. He learned and learned and taught and taught and even as he filled his time so thoroughly that he couldn’t think he still felt so empty. His name changed, he was no longer The-Boy-Who-Lived or The Chosen One, he was The Living Ghost.

He didn’t notice when, decades later, McGonagall retired. Didn’t notice the passing of time or how the looks he got changed from hero worship to something more like skepticism. He didn’t notice the changes in fashion, that he was now wearing what students saw as ancient robes. He didn’t notice that his old rival was now an old man teaching potions in the dungeons or his old roommate teaching herbology in the green houses. He didn’t notice the passing of time until one day during summer break he realized he had read every book in the library. And he left the castle for it no longer had anything to offer him.


	2. Middle: The Library

Things didn’t change in any meaningful way after he left the school. It had been the only home he ever knew and it was all that was still familiar about the world but Harry felt nothing when he left. He didn’t even think when he did it, he just left, disappeared into the night with no warning because he had honestly forgotten that others even knew he was there. He didn’t miss the castle, he didn’t get excited or nervous as he traveled the world after. He didn’t care what people thought when he randomly appeared and lived in a library for years until he knew all it had to offer.

Libraries in the muggle world had changed drastically but he didn’t let himself think of how much he missed and how long it had been since the days of the chunky monitors of his childhood. He just learned to use the new technology, eventually he learned to make it himself and improve upon it. And so he had a traveling muggle library with him now and he could spend all his time on magic. But he knew everything, though new books and discoveries kept coming out there was no new information. The new potions were, to him, just common sense, new charms weren’t really new just old enough to be mostly forgotten.

His centuries of library hopping had come to an end it seemed. So he did something different. He made his own library of knowledge. It only took a hundred years of his time, but after he was done he thought maybe he had created the most vast collection of knowledge in history and for the first time in— had it really been over a thousand years?— he wondered if Hermione would be proud, if she would run through the stacks of the immense library and laugh and marvel at him and thank him with hugs that left his face trapped in her bushy hair and his ribs sore from the tightness of her grip. Ron would probably shake his head in amusement and wonder how Harry had turned into a literal know it all. And Harry realized just how much he had changed since he had known them. The wouldn’t recognize him if he went back now— but he couldn’t go back, they weren’t where he had left them because them and their children and their children’s children would be long dead by now. The first thing he did in his library after its completion was cry for the first time in over one thousand years, but the second thing he did was buy a space in Diagon Alley, or the place that had once been called Diagon Alley at any rate, and placed a portal to his pocket reality of infinite knowledge, and named it “The Library of Hermione” and added one last book to its shelves telling their tale.

Harry was never seen in his library but he and it became well known. He was a legend once again, but now there were historians debating if it was truly Harry Potter that had made the Library of Hermione, and Hermione’s name became a place full of knowledge rather than the girl he knew. People talked and doubted and scrutinized every detail of his life, of Ron’s and Hermione’s lives. They all became something else to people, something not quite real. He was famous again and he should have hated it, hated the attention, but it wasn’t directed at him, not really. People turned to history books and old news papers and stories told by people he once knew. He was still invisible, with or without the cloak draped over his shoulders. He and his friends became history projects at school and he didn’t mind, or maybe he just didn’t think about what that really meant for him.

This was him now. He was living ghost, just watching as time slowly ticked by.

When the world ended he thought he’d end with it. He didn’t.


	3. The End and Another Beginning: The Void

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is a bit of a mind fuck, and probably won’t make any sense to anyone but me but here you go welcome to my brain on a daily basis. I have existential crises quite frequently if you can believe that.

The human brain cannot truly comprehend eternity. Harry was lucky. He had a life that was, geometrically, a ray. Others had lines or ellipses or voids. Harry had a definite beginning to his existence, there was a time when death was certain in his mind. This gave him a sense of self that other immortals just didn’t have. They lived, for lack of a better term, the same way Harry himself had after he became immortal, but they never knew anything else. The thing was, they weren’t even people in the sense Harry was familiar with. They were as infinite as time, they were more energy fields than people if he was honest.

The first Other he met and understood, was The Void. Such empty vastness that he still couldn’t truly comprehend. When adrift in space for what was likely eons Harry became very close with The Void. They didn’t speak, necessarily, but The Void was everything. Each planet and star, asteroid and nebula, was apart of The Void. The cosmic rays and solar winds and gravity wells were their hands that moved and nudged him, the glowing gases of dust that would soon birth stars were a kind of language all their own. The Void spoke in swirls of color and light and constant movement and as Harry drifted in their vastness he began to see the movements of the stars and galaxies not as slow and imperceptible, but as fast and rambunctious and playful and chaotic.

It was a blink and and age all at once. He was there for so long and he changed so much but the time he spent there wasn’t even a fraction of his life because his life was now infinite and never ending and time was different now and he understood things he hadn’t before.

At some point during his time with The Void he had stopped looking like Harry. The physical shell had frozen in the vacuum, been burned without protection from solar rays, suffocated without air to breathe, and disintegrated as bits of atoms broke off and left a scattered trail throughout the cosmos.


	4. Still only the Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so I love this story and I promise to keep updating, but after this I really need to work on something so so different that I’m doing for school so for probably the next two weeks I doubt I’ll post anything. The thing I am working on for Creative Writing class is huge and all consuming in a different way and I need to like, stop having existential crises while I work and bring my brain back to the real science of space and work with real characters who see in a very limited perspective, so very much not this. Okay I’m babbling. Shutting up now.

Harry was something else now. He thought maybe he had become magic. There was no magic left but his, so it seemed a logical deduction. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. Magic had died at some point, in everyone but him. Sometime during his stay in The Void Harry had died and become Magic, and Magic wondered how that worked, how magic had existed be before he, Magic, had. But he didn’t wonder long. He met Time and it became clear. Time was strange, stranger than Magic had ever thought, but once he knew them he understood. Time is a complex thing, they were intertwined so tightly with Reality that sometimes Magic wondered if they were the same being. They worked together, creating threads of energy in everything. One breath on their web would ripple out through eternity. Every movement and choice, every chemical and physical reaction, had affects and consequences. It was like watching a choppy ocean, a million ripples of energy all pushing and pulling on each other, stretching infinitely in every direction. One solar flare one second before could change everything but that solar flare had been created by a billion different factors, anchored so securely that nothing would ever change. But Magic could move through time and reality without touching or changing anything, like in third year, time hadn’t changed at all when they went back, because going back in time was part of time and everything leading up to that moment included them going through time, so the same must apply here. When Magic was ready he could weave his way back to the beginning of humanity and give magic. But not yet, Magic wanted to learn more still, become more, do more. This was still only the beginning of his eternity.


	5. Sorry!

Okay, so I know people are enjoying this and I really really love it, but things have hit a bit of a snag. I will no longer be posting this. Well I might but it won’t be serious or complete. This story has sunk its hooks so deep into my brain and led to so many amazing ideas. I cannot in good conscious put them into the world as part of this unpolished and unoriginal mess. I have something original in the works now because of this, and because of all the wonderful support from you, that I think if I can get my shit together could become something real and make me rich and famous (mostly kidding I just want to make something that people like). Anyway. This story won’t be marked as finished, but from here on it won’t be as serious. It may become a home fro crossover cliches or time travel, or something. Anyway yeah. I wanna win a Hugo award or something for some of the stuff this story has inspired. I won’t be putting it on here.


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